[deleted]
Lambda School’s Misleading Promises
181–190 of 251 posts
Re: Lambda School’s Misleading Promises
#182I'm not a fan of bootcamps because I think a lot of them are more focused on making money than actually helping people who need help. Last year I decided to take action and started a free coding group at our local library: https://www.meetup.com/San-Jose-C0D3 I show up before work every day (M-F at 8am) to help students who are learning how to code. So far no students have gotten a job yet, but our group consistently…
> I'm not a fan of bootcamps because I think a lot of them are more focused on making money than actually helping people
This idea doesn't pass a common sense test to me - I'm sure bootcamps can be profitable, but the people running them are used to building things that scale. Bootcamps definitely don't scale. If these tech people were looking to get-rich-quick they surely wouldn't be running a school, of all things, even a profitable one.
Re: Lambda School’s Misleading Promises
#183I'm not a fan of bootcamps because I think a lot of them are more focused on making money than actually helping people who need help. Last year I decided to take action and started a free coding group at our local library: https://www.meetup.com/San-Jose-C0D3 I show up before work every day (M-F at 8am) to help students who are learning how to code. So far no students have gotten a job yet, but our group consistently…
> I'm not a fan of bootcamps because I think a lot of them are more focused on making money than actually helping people This idea doesn't pass a common sense test to me - I'm sure bootcamps can be profitable, but the people running them are used to building things that scale. Bootcamps definitely don't scale. If these tech people were looking to get-rich-quick they surely wouldn't be running a school, of all things,…
wouldn't be surprised if there's typically a "finance" guy making profit driven/marketing decisions pulling emotional strings on a the (willingly) naive "entrepreneur" partner
Re: Lambda School’s Misleading Promises
#184The more I think about bootcamps, the more they appear to be a rather insulting business proposition. Did they genuinely believe that one can take someone off the street, albeit someone relatively intelligent and motivated, and teach them enough to be a professional programmer in 9 months? Imagine that we replaced programmer with mechanical engineer. Or with marketing executive. Would that sound believable? What is i…
I don't think we could pump out the well rounded developers like 4 years of undergrad can, but I don't see how we couldn't pump out SQL technicians, front-end developers, or otherwise specialized workers that could alleviate the supposed shortage of developers. I also helped a person go from zero knowledge of programming to pumping out android games in a month of self study. So I know that smart, motivated people can…
I think we can pump out good apprentices. After 9 months of study, the person could definitely have enough skills to write semi-valid code and work on some small projects with supervision from a developer. However I would not call this person after 9 months a developer. A developer should be able to look at a codebase, learn it, learn the relevant technologies and start contributing. I doubt a bootcamp graduate will be able to do that. Or worse, they'll do that and wreak havoc on the codebase.
> front-end developers
I suspect this is part of the issue. Plenty of people believe that front-end is easier or lesser than back-end, and therefore can be learned quickly. Lots and lots of terrible front-end code has taught me that this is not true. Good front-end developers are really hard to find and subpar ones can lead to horrible user interfaces and direct impact to the bottom line. Even if we're talking the most minimal of front-end stacks, i.e. HTML, CSS and JS, which, I'm not even sure people hire for anyways, there's a lot of subtle issues with accessibility, responsive UI, writing halfway decent JS, etc. If we add on the various libraries (a sign of a good developer is also knowing when to use these libs and when to avoid them), then the amount of knowledge required is far far more than 9 months can provide.
Re: Lambda School’s Misleading Promises
#185I'm not a fan of bootcamps because I think a lot of them are more focused on making money than actually helping people who need help. Last year I decided to take action and started a free coding group at our local library: https://www.meetup.com/San-Jose-C0D3 I show up before work every day (M-F at 8am) to help students who are learning how to code. So far no students have gotten a job yet, but our group consistently…
> I'm not a fan of bootcamps because I think a lot of them are more focused on making money than actually helping people This idea doesn't pass a common sense test to me - I'm sure bootcamps can be profitable, but the people running them are used to building things that scale. Bootcamps definitely don't scale. If these tech people were looking to get-rich-quick they surely wouldn't be running a school, of all things,…
Why do you believe that the folks running bootcamps are "tech people" themselves? If they weren't, would the profit notice make sense?
Re: Lambda School’s Misleading Promises
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I'm not a fan of bootcamps because I think a lot of them are more focused on making money than actually helping people This idea doesn't pass a common sense test to me - I'm sure bootcamps can be profitable, but the people running them are used to building things that scale. Bootcamps definitely don't scale. If these tech people were looking to get-rich-quick they surely wouldn't be running a school, of all things,…
Why do you believe that the folks running bootcamps are "tech people" themselves? If they weren't, would the profit notice make sense?
Well they must at least be aware of the tech scene and how it works, since they're working closely with it.
Re: Lambda School’s Misleading Promises
#187Having friends in the program, I can tell you it's run like a circus. Expecting 10 people who don't have any experience programming to cooperate on a project without any support or oversight is just asking for student failures. Of course they'll say that the students have supports through their PMs, EMs or TLs (depending on the mood, they change the role title), but they're never available and miss meetings constantl…
I agree with almost everything you say. However all the college projects I was part of, there was no supervision whatsoever. We were all children learning to be adults. Some of us were already there before others. I'm guessing lambda students are more adults than kids. Bottom line, TA support is golden. Supervision, not so much.
This is a golden example of where in person beats online. It's so much easier to weed out the people who will not show up when you do things in person (and there are plenty of those in College). But even diligent people are more likely to flake when things are online. There's simply less commitment.
Re: Lambda School’s Misleading Promises
#188I'm not a fan of bootcamps because I think a lot of them are more focused on making money than actually helping people who need help. Last year I decided to take action and started a free coding group at our local library: https://www.meetup.com/San-Jose-C0D3 I show up before work every day (M-F at 8am) to help students who are learning how to code. So far no students have gotten a job yet, but our group consistently…
> I'm not a fan of bootcamps because I think a lot of them are more focused on making money than actually helping people This idea doesn't pass a common sense test to me - I'm sure bootcamps can be profitable, but the people running them are used to building things that scale. Bootcamps definitely don't scale. If these tech people were looking to get-rich-quick they surely wouldn't be running a school, of all things,…
Why don't you think schools can scale? You need instructional material and the equivalent of professors/lecturers and TAs. Instructional material scales really well; that's what textbooks and MOOCs are. Professors scale well; otherwise 100 plus lectures wouldn't work at all. They obviously do. Intro classes in the huge majority of US universities are in the 100-600 range. I wouldn't be surprised if there are bigger. So the only possible limiting factor that might not scale is TAs. You can render this irrelevant by having high enough standards for entry, like GA Tech's OMSCS, or you can work on scaling it.
There are definitely people who can do a challenging Master's degree with minimal help and feedback, just books, marked essay assignments and a final written exam. This is a model that's as old as the University of London. TAs and structure will increase the proportion of those who start who actually finish.
What about running a school obviously doesn't scale?
Re: Lambda School’s Misleading Promises
#189From seeing this guy's (Allred's) tweets pop up on twitter a few time, I always got the feeling that he was a scammer or con artist. This article provides a lot of evidence that seems to confirm my hunch. I've seen people have success in startups using similar tactics throughout my career, and one realization I've had about this is that sometimes perception matters more than the actual numbers. It's especially true w…
Taking a more benign view, I don't know if Austen is a scammer, but he seems like a smart guy, who's a bit over his head, with a smart team, who are in over their heads. The kind of students they've targeted need more help, not less, which makes this a bit of a messy situation.
Re: Lambda School’s Misleading Promises
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why do you believe that the folks running bootcamps are "tech people" themselves? If they weren't, would the profit notice make sense?
Well they must at least be aware of the tech scene and how it works, since they're working closely with it.
But they’re not. They’re salesmen selling a product to uneducated people.
There’s no requirement they be part of the “tech scene” ... whatever that is.